Quiz books and similar self-help testing materials are well known in the educational field. Such materials are designed to allow a student to pursue self-directed studies in a particular subject while at the same time allow the student to gauge his or her progress in mastery of the material being studied.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to self testing materials is the arrangement of questions and answers so that the answer to a particular question is not discoverable merely by passive inspection, such as when the answer appears with the question. Rather, it is necessary in some way to separate the answer from the question so that the answer is not immediately apparent but also so that undue time is not wasted when the answer is intentionally sought.
Various solutions to arrangement of questions and answers have been proposed, but all suffer limitations. With quiz books, the answers are provided rearward of the question material, such as in an appendix, and are generally presented in the same order as the questions. This approach does prevent answer discovery while a question is being read and considered, but nevertheless suffers from some serious deficiencies. First, because the answers are in the same order as the questions, noticing the answer to the next question is often unavoidable. Thus, the student is forced to answer a block or group of questions before consulting the answers in order to avoid inadvertent discovery of answers if she were to consult the answer column on a question by question basis. The inability to consider and answer each question individually, thereby learning individually from each mistake, is a serious pedagogic impediment to standard quiz books.
To overcome this problem, some workers arrange the answers to questions more or less randomly, by arranging the answers in a different numerical order which is then cross-referenced with the numerical order of the original questions. Such a system is very cumbersome, requiring a great deal of time to locate an answer, and often results in one or more "false starts" when the cross reference is forgotten or miss-remembered during a search.
Another problem encountered with known quiz books is the general inability to display questions and answers simultaneously. In standard arrangements, a quiz book user must flip back and forth between the desired question and the answer section of the book. One approach to solving this problem has been to print answers to questions in small type, place the answers in a block and print them upside down at the bottom of the page displaying the relevant questions. This approach is generally unsatisfactory because it is often easy to inadvertently discover the answer to a question not yet considered and because reading an answer often requires inversion of the text, which is awkward and time consuming.
Although stacks of quiz cards are known, they are awkward and time-consuming to use. In order to avoid inadvertent discovery of an answer, each card is generally provided with but a single question prompt on one face and an answer on the reverse face. Such devices have two significant limitations. First, as it is not possible to view the question and answer simultaneously, mental association of the question and answer is impaired. Second, such presentation of learning material is very cumbersome and inefficient in that a relatively small amount of information can be presented in any single set of cards and in that such cards are difficult to manipulate when in use.
Several workers have attempted to address these problems, but without complete success. In one device, a transparent sleeve overlying the top page of a book holds a slidable page masker that can alternately conceal and reveal the answers printed alongside the questions on the top page. When all the questions on the top page have been answered, it is removed to reveal the next one which then becomes the top page. Different embodiments of this device address the traditional limitations of quiz cards, but without permitting multiple use and easy rearrangement of information display elements.
From the foregoing, it is apparent that there is a need for improved self testing materials in which both questions and answers can be displayed simultaneously; in which the answer to a particular question cannot be discovered by mere passive inspection but can be intentionally determined with a minimum of effort.